EcoVent Will Give Every Room Its Own Temperature

Why should everyone in your home have to agree about where to set the thermostat?

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Dipul Patel was just trying to save some money for his wedding when he went around his house closing the heating vents. The problem came when he forgot to open them, accidentally leaving his poor mother to shiver through the night during a visit to his house.

Never again. Today Patel is CEO of ecoVent, a startup creating a smart home heating/environmental system that regulates the temperatures of individual rooms according to customized preferences. Patel hopes to the days of family members having to squabble over the thermostat, or of individual rooms being too hot or cold. "You shouldn't have to adapt to your home," he says.

The fiasco with his mother inspired Patel to leave an engineering post at aerospace giant Lockheed Martin and enter the MIT graduate program and start the company. Patel says DIYers can install the ecoVent components in about two hours. (Patel adds that for now, the ecoVent approach only works with forced-air environmental systems.)

The system is designed to achieve optimal temperatures in different areas of the home by moving conditioned air between locations, Patel says, and can currently be controlled from a computer, smartphone, or tablet. The company's developers are already working on a more fully intuitive program capable of anticipating a homeowner's needs without any direction.

The ecoVent system, which the company claims will cost less than a quarter of what it takes to install and run an existing multi-zone heating and cooling system, is geared toward eliminating temperature imbalances throughout and maintaining customized temperatures without wasting hot or cold air on other rooms not being used. The system relies on a wireless smart thermostat, Patel says, that learns your habits and maintains temperature preferences for specific rooms. Then, a network of sensors installed throughout a house or apartment track movement, temperature and humidity levels, and automatically controlled vent units work to fill a room or redirect the air to other living areas as needed.

A video posted on the company's website indicates the smart ecoVent home heating/environmental system would cost about $1300 annually, compared to the estimated $2000 in annual costs for a standard HVAC system. The company promises to cut a home's utility bills by at least 35 percent annually. Patel says the unique home heating system will pay for itself in about three years and is expected to operate upward of 15 years, if not longer.

The company, established through a business incubation program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has garnered attention through several entrepreneurial competitions and recently won a $10,000 award for being the most promising startup out of several fledgling innovation companies from Harvard and MIT. The outfit expects to have beta system units up and running by the early part of next year and consumer-ready units set for production by the end of 2014.